Free Speech Week

Has Milo Yiannopoulos’s Berkeley Troll Circus Become a Fyre Festival for the Right?

The right-wing provocateur promised the “Woodstock” of the far right. But as “Free Speech Week” looms in Berkeley, California, many in his world are wondering whether it will be more like the next Fyre Festival.

Yiannopoulous protests outside of Simon & Schuster on July 7th after they chose to cancel his book deal.

By Drew Angerer/Getty Images.

When Milo Yiannopoulos last visited U.C. Berkeley, in February, he was met with a spectacular protest straight out of a conservative fever dream. The students of the university, famous for its left-wing activists, set up blockades in front of the hall where the controversial far-right figure was supposed to speak. Black-masked antifa protesters, including many non-Berkeley students from Oakland, swept through the plaza with rocks and Molotov cocktails, and left a trail of destruction in their wake: smashed windows, toppled police towers, and injured students. While in the end Yiannopoulos wasn’t permitted to speak, the event was nevertheless deemed a decisive media victory. Milo had provoked, and Berkeley had responded, as if precisely following a script. The university was shown to be a definitively illiberal institution. Even Donald Trump got in on the leftist bashing, tweeting a subtle threat: “If U.C. Berkeley does not allow free speech and practices violence on innocent people with a different point of view — NO FEDERAL FUNDS?” In the strange calculus of the current free speech war, Yiannopoulos had won by not being allowed to open his mouth.

But Yiannopoulos was hardly able to capitalize on this form of media-trolling glory. The following months, after all, were rather tumultuous. He was forced to resign from Breitbart after it was revealed that he uttered comments that seemed to condone pedophilia. In the wake of the scandal, Simon & Schuster dropped his book deal. (He would later self-publish his work, Dangerous.) He launched a multimedia venue called Milo Inc., with a purported investment of at least $10 million, and promised stunts that failed to meet the notoriety he promised.

But then, in August, he announced that he would return to the scene of his former triumph. At Berkeley he planned to hold a four day-long event called “Free Speech Week,” sponsored by Milo Inc., from September 24 to 27, which would be a celebration of conservative thought held at the epicenter of left-wing activism. The initial lineup appeared impressive, including appearances by conservative megastars such as Ann Coulter and Steve Bannon. “‘This is going to be our Woodstock,’ ” Mike Cernovich, the Infowars host and Twitter activist, recalled Yiannopoulos telling him. (Yiannopoulos declined to comment for this story.)

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The university quickly promised that it would do everything it could to facilitate the event, to the chagrin of many in the Berkeley community. “I don’t want Berkeley being used as a punching bag,” Berkeley mayor Jesse Arreguintold the San Francisco Chronicle, calling for the event to be canceled. “I am concerned about these groups using large protests to create mayhem.”

Less than two weeks before the event was to begin, however, a more complicated reality began to emerge. Prominent personalities listed on the schedule—academics like Charles Murray and Heather MacDonald; pundit Michael Malice; and former Google engineer James Damore—said they had never been invited in the first place. Gateway Pundit’s Lucian Wintrichannounced on Wednesday night that he was withdrawing from the event, citing both a packed schedule and “uncertainty surrounding the event on both sides.” Coulter silently disappeared from several iterations of the scheduled lineup. Bannon’s calendar suddenly became clogged with what several associates told me were previous commitments. (Neither Coulter nor Bannon’s representatives returned the Hive’s requests for comment.) And Cernovich, who was listed as a speaker on several schedules, told me that many other speakers were unsure whether they should come, too. “It’s very frustrating for everyone involved, myself included,” he said. “I know I’m scheduled to speak on the 27th. I plan on speaking on the 27th. But that’s all I know.”

Meanwhile, university spokespeople told the press that the Berkeley Patriot, a tiny extreme-right organization of five to 10 students, had not filled out the proper paperwork to reserve the several buildings required to host such a large, multi-day affair. Without those papers, university spokesman Dan Mogulof told me, the campus would not be able to provide security or speaking venues. “One of the befuddling things here is that they were first shown that contract about five weeks ago,” he said. “They missed three deadlines to sign it, would not take no for an answer, would not accept that we were not going to treat them differently than any other of the 1,000 student organizations on this campus.”

Milo Inc., however, countered with another rendition of events, telling the world in a video that Berkeley was trying to impede conservatives’ right to speak on campus—that Berkeley administrators had been throwing bureaucratic impediments in their way for months, refusing to answer their e-mails for weeks, and dropping outrageous fees on them at the last minute. “It’s quite simple: the University didn’t want the event to happen, but they couldn’t cancel outright, so they needed to make it look like it was our own fault,” Pranav Jandhyala, a news editor for the Patriot’s site, said in a press release. (“Reaching out is one thing, they’ve had a lot of contact with the police force,” Mogulof rebutted. “But what they haven’t done is filled out the forms that are necessary.”)

As the event date nears, the biggest problem may be the mounting speculation that Yiannopoulos is bluffing. Rather than an actual Free Speech Week, was he really just searching for another media win? “It really does seem like Milo and his people don’t actually want this event to happen,” one speaker on the lineup told me. “I do know there will be more press if this doesn’t happen, and then they can blame the big, bad, Berkeley University.” The thought was echoed by several prominent right-wingers whom I spoke with.

In the most generous interpretation, Free Speech Week has quickly devolved into the right’s own Fyre Festival. It is an event promising to push the boundaries of the First Amendment but is crippled by severe mismanagement, lack of communication, reluctant academic bureaucracy, and a company of inexperienced naïfs working with a tiny group of equally inexperienced college students.

Protestors reject Yiannopoulos’ scheduled appearance at UC Berkeley in early February of this year.

By Elijah Nouvelage/Getty Images.

Of all the fronts the right has opened in its war against the left, free speech has been the most successful, and Berkeley, traditional hotbed of student activism and original home to the Free Speech movement of the 1960s, its most favored battlefield. After Yiannopoulos’s February speech at Berkeley was canceled, Coulter withdrew a subsequent speech out of concern for her safety, and even Bernie Sanders took Berkeley and its activists to task. “To me, it’s a sign of intellectual weakness,” Sanders told the Huffington Post shortly afterward. “If you can’t ask Ann Coulter, in a polite way, questions which expose the weakness of her arguments, if all you can do is boo, or shut her down, or prevent her from coming, what does that tell the world?”

As recently as last week, Berkeley did not exactly roll out the red carpet for an event held by prominent conservative pundit and Milo critic Ben Shapiro. The event planning was contentious to begin with, according to representatives from both the university and the organizers, and culminated in a massive security blockade meant to prevent another riot. “I think it’s very clear that Berkeley does just about anything it can to try to prevent people they disagree with from appearing,” said Spencer Brown, a spokesman for the conservative-leaning group Young Americans for Freedom, which sponsored the event, before reciting a long list of obstacles he said the university had put in the event’s path. But eventually, the event was pulled off with few incidents and no violence, thanks to Berkeley spending nearly $600,000 of its own money to provide security, a number it repeatedly emphasized in news reports. Brown said he would not be surprised if Berkeley was tossing bureaucratic obstacles in Milo Inc.’s way. But he begrudgingly applauded the school and the Berkeley Police Department’s commitment to ensuring security and safety. “Milo, like everyone else, has a right to speak. But we did jump through every hoop Berkeley provided, and they did their job in providing security,” Shapiro told me. In an interview released Wednesday, University of California president Janet Napolitanosaid the university would make the same commitment to Free Speech Week. (A press release from Milo Inc. dismissed Berkeley’s investment in Shapiro’s event as “virtue signaling.”)

Policing aside, the current plans are problematic for other reasons. “A lot of these people are also very put off, because it seems like a lot of this stuff might be conducted outdoors,” said one person who’s scheduled to speak, predicting “massive dropouts” if the events were all held in publicly available outdoor spaces that did not require deposits from U.C. Berkeley. (The latest schedule from Berkeley showed that all the events were in outdoor venues.) Insiders describe a chaotic process, with some potential speakers revolting when they learned Yiannopoulos was hosting, and others revealing they had never been invited at all. Other conservatives had approached Milo Inc. with requests to take the newly empty speaking times but were rebuffed with claims that the schedule was “completely full.”

As of Wednesday, however, Berkeley’s official schedule for the four-day event had four speakers, including Yiannopoulos, and was studded with “unconfirmed speakers” who had not provided confirmation forms to Berkeley. Perhaps more oddly, the speaker I spoke with forwarded me an e-mail from Milo Inc. asking speakers not to book their flights or hotels, as the company would do it for them. But it provided an unusual stipulation: Milo Inc. would not even tell the speakers what flights it had booked, or what hotels they would be staying at, until 48 hours before the day they were scheduled to speak. “We are doing this in order to prevent any more sabotage then [sic] we have already faced, especially with the university’s behavior,” it read.

(“Those two things don’t make sense. Berkeley doesn’t control the airports,” the speaker complained, calling it “needlessly chaotic”—perhaps on purpose. “The only real read on that is that they might be banking on this not happening, and if it doesn’t happen, they don’t want to waste money on plane tickets.”)

Cernovich chose to give Yiannopoulos the benefit of the doubt. “If it was never intended to happen, then Milo would have lied to everyone he knows, and that would be a really foolish miscalculation,” he said, adding that at Yiannopoulos’s request, he had canceled a visit to see his newborn daughter in order to attend. That did not, however, exempt Yiannopoulos from criticism. “I’m frustrated with Milo’s team’s response to this,” said Cernovich, who earlier had expressed his anticipation of the “good” optics of antifa attacking speakers. “They need to be answering media questions and not just being glib about it. They need to say, ‘The event’s going to happen, here’s when and where, and give people reassurances. Otherwise, if media’s not going to cover it, and people don’t show up because they’re not sure what’s going to happen—a tree falls in a forest, nobody hears it fall.”

The speaker whom I spoke with said that he hoped that Milo Inc. could get its act together and try, somehow, to salvage and professionalize the event before Sunday. “I think a lot of us have understood the necessity of bringing our views to a younger audience,” he said, echoing the core argument of The Shadow University, the seminal 1998 book laying out the right’s argument about the academic suppression of free speech: “There’s a wide belief out that there that there’s some liberal indoctrination going on at universities, and that’s leading toward a whole bevy of problems with these kids when they graduate.”

Perhaps that’s what makes the potential of Free Speech Week so compelling for everyone involved. For the right-wing trolls, it’s a once-in-a-lifetime chance to collectively air their grievances in a politically volatile and potent environment, in the heart of a university simultaneously committed to its legacy as a bastion of free speech and to its student body of raging progressives. For the Berkeley administration, the event is its most high-profile attempt to prove that those two commitments can co-exist in a post-modern, post-truth, hyper-partisan era. And if it means begrudgingly tolerating Milo Yiannopoulos’s antics for the sake of the First Amendment, so be it. “As far as we know, the only institution that’s ever rescinded an invitation to Milo Yiannopoulos was the Conservative Political Action Conference,” a university official told me. “And we don’t want to be confused with that.”

Correction: An earlier version of this article referred to a prominent list of conservatives attending Free Speech Week. Pundit Michael Malice has said he is not conservative.